Skeddly Blog

This article has been updated on 2017-01-27 to include some additional details regarding hourly prices and days-per-month differences.

Amazon Lightsail provides a simpler pricing model compared to Amazon EC2. The pricing for Lightsail is advertised “per month”. For example, $5 per month or $20 per month.

What isn’t up front is that, like EC2, you are actually charged for your Lightsail instances on an hourly basis. So, if your Lightsail instance only exists for 100 hours of the month, then you are only charged for those 100 hours.

Earlier today, we announced our Create Lightsail Instance Snapshots action. Creating snapshots is a great practice, but you will also want to clean up old snapshots. This way, you won’t accumulate costs for unnecessary backups.

Today, we are also announcing the second of our Lightsail actions: Delete Lightsail Instance Snapshots.

At AWS re:Invent 2016, AWS announced Amazon Lightsail, Amazon’s Virtual Private Server solution. Lightsail is targeted at the VPS market, with a simpler, albeit less flexible solution compared to EC2. But with Lightsail, users can get up-and-running quickly with a Linux server with many pre-bundled application packages, such as WorkPress, a LAMP stack, or Redmine.

Like many AWS solutions, Lightsail provides a way to create snapshots of your servers. However, the process of creating Lightsail instance snapshots is a manual one: you must create snapshots using the web front-end, or the AWS CLI.

Today, we are announcing the first of our Lightsail actions: Create Lightsail Instance Snapshots.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service where you can query your data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL statements. Amazon Athena only reads your data, it will not add to or modify it. So you can think of it as only being able to execute SELECT statements.

Today, we’re going to take closer look at Amazon Athena pricing and how you can reduce your Athena costs.

Amazon Athena pricing is based on the bytes scanned. Anything you can do to reduce the amount of data that’s being scanned will help reduce your Amazon Athena query costs.

In our previous article, Partitioning Your Data With Amazon Athena, we partitioned our data into folders to reduce the amount of data scanned. But those partitions were being loaded into our Athena table manually.

In this article, we will show how to load the partitions automatically.

At AWS re:Invent 2016, Amazon announced Amazon Athena, a query service allowing you to execute SQL queries on your data stored in Amazon S3. Athena can query against CSV files, JSON data, or row data parsed by regular expressions. Using Amazon Athena, you don’t need to extract and load your data into a database to perform queries against your data.

Amazon Athena is not a full CRUD database system. It can only query data. So you basically can only perform SELECT queries on your data in S3. You cannot execute any INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE queries.

Whether you are a small AWS user or a large enterprise, security and auditing should be front-of-mind when it comes to your AWS account.

AWS CloudTrail provides a way to record all AWS API calls. Logs are saved to an Amazon S3 bucket for you. You can read and process the logs yourself, or you can use one of the many third-party tools and services available to you.

Today, we’re happy to announce a new action available to you: Create CloudTrail Trails.